Payment tokens are being used to conduct payment transactions. A payment token may be a substitute for an account number. The use of payment tokens instead of account numbers is desirable, since the underlying accounts will not be compromised if the payment tokens are compromised.
While the use of payment tokens is desirable, entities in a transaction system may need information about the payment token for various reasons. For example, entities such as merchants may want to perform fraud or risk analyses on the payment token before initiating a transaction. Yet, it is not possible to run traditional fraud or risk analyses on the payment token since it includes purposefully obfuscated account information. To obtain information about the payment token, one must make appropriate inquiries to remote databases that store the information.
This problem is further exacerbated when account information is exposed to various entities during the transaction life-cycle. This may lead to multiple tokenization layers that are applied to the payment token by each entity that processes the payment token. For example, a digital wallet may tokenize an account number to generate a first payment token and a merchant or acquirer may apply an additional tokenization layer to generate a second payment token from the first payment token. The additional tokenization processing that takes place can further obfuscate the original account number and any information that may relate to the original payment token.
Accordingly, there is a need for a token processing system that may be capable of providing context including any important or relevant information associated with a token to a number of entities within a transaction processing system.
Embodiments of the invention address these and other problems, individually and collectively.